Date of Graduation

5-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Industrial Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Sullivan, Kelly

Committee Member/Reader

Rainwater, Chase

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are an emerging technology used to monitor an environment over time. One specific application of the wireless sensor network is the border security application. Researchers have adapted coverage metrics from general wireless sensor network literature to fit the border security application. While some of the adapted metrics count the number of sensors detecting a potential target, others measure the distance between a potential target and its nearest sensor. No existing metric accounts for both of these factors. To take advantage of this gap and to attempt to increase the accuracy to which coverage is measured in this application, we created the total intersected length metric.

To test the adapted metrics in comparison to our new metric, we created a MATLAB program to simulate a wireless sensor network over time as its sensors fail and its coverage degrades. Through experimentation with this model on a notional data set, we can conclude that the total intersected length metric used for measuring network coverage for border security WSN applications has both advantages and disadvantages when compared to traditional coverage metrics. The new metric was found to be advantageous for effectively capturing the initial coverage of a network and for determining when a network is no longer sufficiently covered while it was found to be disadvantageous for conservatively capturing network degradation and for producing quick computation times.

Keywords

Wireless sensor network, coverage metrics, operations research

Share

COinS